I’ve got a piece up on the front page focusing on the hypocrisy of many of those who are making the most noise about the UK phone-hacking scandal – namely the Guardian newspaper, the BBC and Labour Party MPs.
If you think I’m making too much of the BBC’s obsession with the story, don’t take my word for it – here’s the BBC’s very own foreign editor, Jon Williams, complaining on Twitter that his employers are covering hacking to the detriment of other important stories around the world.
One of the neglected stories he mentions is the unfolding debt crisis threatening the Euro, and Brit blogger Mark Wallace, who picked up on William’s Twitter post, has done an unscientific but still telling survey, searching the BBC News website for references to ‘Libya’, ‘euro’ and ‘hacking’ over the past week. Libya got 23 mentions, euro 32 and hacking (drumroll) a whopping 246. I rest my case.
As I write on the front page, the BBC wants to damage Murdoch because he’s their biggest rival in the UK, and notwithstanding the fact that the BBC already dominates news output in Britain they’d very much like him out of the way so they can peddle their liberal-left bias unopposed. They’d also like to see the back of Prime Minister David Cameron, and eventually the Tory-led government.
Big media is all about making money for the small group of people who own it. The interlocking network of incestuous ownership of the mainstream media – and not just the Murdoch outlets – has to be seen to be believed. Murdoch’s network in the US, Fox News, is closer to the center than the other (hard-left) networks, but it is not, and never has claimed to be, a conservative network. Yet the other networks – and Media Matters – hope to silence it anyway.
Who owns the media – and what can we do?
Could some kind soul explain why the phone hacking is so horrible that it caused Murdock to close the paper?
I mean, that seems like an awfully extreme punishment, and it was self-inflicted.
All his reporters did was call into voicemail, guess a few passwords, listen to the messages and delete a few, right?
I mean, a fine, great, a lawsuit with a few million bucks in damages, great, but plenty of journalists have done illegal stuff (Pentagon Papers, Wikileaks, Watergate reporting, etc, etc) and received nothing but praise for it.
Why close a long-running, much-beloved paper for such penny-ante stuff?
D